We investigate the returns to capital and capital accumulation using panel data of Peruvian micro enterprises (MEs). Marginal returns to capital are found to be very high at low levels of capital, but rapidly decreasing at higher levels. The dynamic analyses of capital accumulation in MEs...

This paper studies the pro-poor bias of contemporary trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of eliminating the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro-poor trade policy is expected to have lower welfare gains or higher welfare loss at the low end of the...

This paper considers the statistical analysis of large panel data sets where even afterconditioning on common observed effects the cross section units might remain dependentlydistributed. This could arise when the cross section units are subject to unobserved commoneffects and/or if there are...

Indian girls have significantly lower school enrollment rates than boys. Anecdotal evidence suggests that gender-differential treatment is the main explanation, but empirical support is often weak. I analyze school enrollment using rainfall shocks, a plausibly exogenous source of income...

Sharing is a norm in many societies. We present a theoretical model on the trade-off between sharing and investment which we test on data from tailors in Burkina Faso. The empirical results support the idea that there are two behavioural patterns: entrepreneurs following an 'insurance regime'...

The program evaluation literature for population and health policies is in flux, with many disciplines documenting biological and behavioral linkages from fetal development to late life mortality, chronic disease, and disability, though their implications for policy remain uncertain. Both macro-...

What causes alcohol abuse and domestic violence and how can we stop them? These behaviors have multiple determinants, making the effects of changes in wife's and husband's income ambiguous. This paper estimates the effects of exogenous changes in wife's and husband's income on husband alcohol...

Udry (1996) uses household survey data and finds that the allocation of resources within households is Pareto inefficient, contradicting the main assumption of most collective models of intrahousehold bargaining. He finds that among plots planted with the same crop in the same year, within a...

We use a representative sample of informal entrepreneurs in Madagascar to add new evidence on the magnitude of the gender performance gap. After controlling for business and entrepreneur characteristics, female-owned businesses exhibit a value added 28 percent lower than their male counterparts....

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children...